124
Book · 2025
Quello che so di te
After the birth of her daughter, a woman resolves that she cannot succumb to the instability that runs in her family. She traces this inheritance to her great-grandmother Venera, who was admitted to the Mandalari psychiatric hospital in Messina decades earlier. Returning to Messina, she sifts through conflicting family lore, institutional records, and wartime memories of fathers and sons to piece together what really happened to Venera.
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Quello che so di te is, at once, memory, autofiction, a family novel, and historical inquiry. It is a text that spans generations—great-grandmother, grandmother, mother, daughter—interrogating not only emotional and identity inheritance, but also a collective repression: that tied to psychiatric hospitals, mental illness, and institutional violence. The personal becomes political without ever being didactic. Intimate history becomes a fissure in History.
Davide Boccia on Goodreads I was sorry to say goodbye to Venera and also to Nadia Terranova. Her writing is precise, powerful, with sudden flashes and sharp as a blade. Her exploration of family mythology captivated and fascinated me. Her reflections on motherhood and on being a mother and a writer made me feel seen, understood. I adored every page; it is a book that you devour and that devours you at the same time.
Annarita Caramico on Goodreads
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